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Opponents of this view harken back to doomsday forecasts framed decades ago by prominent analyses like The Limits to Growth or The Population Bomb. Economic and environmental disasters that should already have overwhelmed us by now have instead been postponed indefinitely, thanks to changes in our behavior, economic policy or technological capabilities. Discussion of those disasters undoubtedly prompted at least some of the necessary changes, and could do so again in the case of phosphorus.

This optimistic perspective benefited from a 2010 revision of estimates of the world’s phosphate reserves. New figures from the International Fertilizer Development Center raise the estimate from 16 billion metric tons to more than 60 billion metric tons. The author of that report, geologist Steven Van Kauwenbergh, insists that this finding should put an end to any immediate concerns about peak phosphorus.

“Based on this estimate,” he says, “at current rates of production, phosphate rock reserves to produce fertilizer will be available for 300 to 400 years.”

At the same time, Van Kauwenbergh cautions that the sources of information used for this estimate tend to be limited, provided primarily by industrial interests. “A collaborative effort by phosphate rock producers, government agencies, international organizations and academia will be required to make a more definitive estimate of world phosphate rock reserves and resources,” he concludes.

Brave New Sources

Even if phosphate is more abundant than previously thought, the distribution of reserves poses a big challenge.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s latest figures, published in January 2013, Morocco and Western Sahara appear to contain no fewer than 50 billion of the estimated 67 billion metric tons of phosphates, some 74 percent of the total. The rest is found in various places in much smaller amounts, with 5.5 percent in China, 3.3 percent in Algeria and 2.7 per cent in Syria. The remainder is spread among the rest of the world’s nations, with major agricultural countries such as South Africa, Russia, and the United States each holding less than 2.5 percent.

One promising technology is a chemical reactor that can be installed in municipal wastewater streams, where human urine provides a rich supply of raw material.In addition to political considerations, poor transportation links limit the volume of fertilizer reaching farmers in some countries, where a correspondingly high price makes this input all the less accessible. Even without the dire threat of peak phosphorus, as growing population boosts demand for food, intensifying competition along narrow international supply lines could place fertilizers beyond the reach of many more farmers.

Faced with this challenge, sources like that tapped in Brave New World could take on a fresh appeal. In fact, though it does not yet extend to crematoria, phosphorus recovery is not consigned to science fiction.

One promising technology is a chemical reactor that can be installed in municipal wastewater streams, where human urine provides a rich supply of raw material. Urine forms the basis of ammonium magnesium phosphate, a white crystal known as struvite. Struvite cakes on the walls of sluiceways and sewers, hardening into a concrete-like consistency that is onerous to remove.

Struvite, if it can be extracted in a pure form, offers the basis for an effective fertilizer. For example, an extraction technology produced by Vancouver-based Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies Inc. has been installed in cities in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. The system, like others, aspires to provide a cost-effective means of capturing struvite for agricultural use.

The Other Half

The other half of the phosphorus predicament, ironically, is a problem of localized overabundance. Soils in many parts of North America have naturally high levels of phosphorus. Add too much more in an attempt to boost crop yields, and nutrients drain off the land to fertilize lakes and rivers. What often follows is the proliferation of algae in these waters, which then become oxygen-poor and inhospitable to plant or animal life. This process, known as eutrophication, can compromise aquatic ecosystems.

“We have understood the causes of eutrophication for more than 40 years, while the drivers have gotten worse,” says Stephen Carpenter, a professor at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Limnology in Madison. “Increased planting of corn, increased livestock numbers and increasingly variable precipitation due to climate change are principal drivers of increased eutrophication. We decreased the discharge from sewage treatment plants, but at the same time the runoff of manure and overfertilized soil became much worse.”

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For a blog about sustainability, your articles display a surprising lack of sustainability principles. Everything is cyclical. Everything has an appropriate scale. In the case of agriculture, the answer to the phosphorous issue, and most other problems with food too numerous to mention, is bring the scale back down to the bioregion, and cycle the nutrients there.

Small scale and organic is already feeding the large majority of the world, probably in the neighborhood of 70% or so. Yet we spend so much time worrying about industrial totalitarian agriculture. Why should this be? Because it is the industrialized countries that mostly eat the food that comes from this system. It's not really the developing world that needs totalitarian agriculture, it's us, the privileged. It's us who would starve because we have become so divorced from where our food comes from and how to go about growing it.

Jon FoleyJun. 11th, 2013

You raise some good points, but a quick correction: less than 1% of the world's food production is actually certified organic, and maybe a bit more is not certified. Nothing close to 70% you claim.

Plus, organic farms per se are not always closed loop nutrient systems. They often depend on manure inputs, usually from conventional farms (often with chemical fertilizers used in the animal feed) down the road. It's rare to find any truly closed nutrient loops in agriculture anywhere, conventional or organic. So, organic is not automatically a solution to all of this, although it is clearly better in many respects.

With that said, major changes in nutrient use is needed, and you identify a great many of the challenges we need to address. It's a big problem.

Brent VerrillJun. 18th, 2013

Jon Foley: Certified organic was not the point I was trying to make. My point was to suggest that industrial agriculture's problem with nutrient cycling can not be solved within an industrial agriculture paradigm. Further, I was pointing out the irony that an article on a sustainability blog did not make the leap from the linear industrial paradigm to the cyclical sustainability paradigm.

I agree that Certified Organic agriculture is almost identical to industrial chemical agriculture. It is still a tilled monocultural disaster. It just doesn't have the poisons as an input, and so is marginally better for us and ecosystems. But still disastrous.

As for the 70% figure... I am talking about global food provisioning. Not your food, not my food. Global. We live in the "First World." (I assume you live in a "First World" nation...)

Here is a summary of a report that estimates, because the hard data is not available, that conservatively "70% of the food the world actually consumes every year is provisioned by rural and urban
peasants." Peasants can't afford chemicals or seed, and so have to find other ways to ensure fertility. They may not be Certified Organic, but they are cycling nutrients somehow. http://www.etcgroup.org/sites/www.etcgroup.org/files/Who%20will%20feed%20us%20all.pdf

Here is another little tidbit out of Russia that says that small family held farms are producing a sizable quantity of food in that industrialized country. http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/in-1999-35-million-small-family-plots-produced-90-of-russias-potatoes-77-of-vegetables-87-of-fruits-59-of-meat-49-of-milk-way-to-go-people/

Other estimates say that about 15% of food production is in urban areas, 85% of food is "local," and 75% of farmers save seed and grow locally adapted varieties. If you are saving seed, you're probably not dousing it with chemicals.

Like I said before, if the industrial agriculture system were to fail tomorrow, it would be you and I that would probably starve. We are heavily invested in the linear paradigm of food production. Our lives depend on it. The non-industrialized parts of the world would get along pretty well. I humbly propose that we have a lot to learn and the poorest among us should be our teachers. But if we live under the illusion that industrial agriculture is currently feeding most of the people, then we won't be able to visualize what is possible from a different paradigm.

Shouldn't Ensia, a blog about sustainability, have articles that are framed within a sustainability paradigm?

Jim ElserJun. 25th, 2013

Various efforts are underway globally to meet the P sustainability challenge described in this article, including Dr Cordell's efforts at the Institute for Sustainable Futures. These include the Global TraPS project centered out of Switzerland (www.globaltraps.ch/‎), the Nutrient Platform centered out of the Netherlands (http://www.nutrientplatform.org/), and the Sustainable Phosphorus Initiative centered out of Arizona, USA http://sustainablep.asu.edu/). The latter includes a new book "Phosphorus, Food, and Our Future" that synthesizes the outcomes of the 2011 Sustainable P Summit held in Tempe Arizona (http://tinyurl.com/n4gc8u3). Also relevant is the new NSF-funded Research Coordination Network on P sustainability (http://sustainability.asu.edu/research/project.php?id=704)

So, help is on the way! (?)

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